Not All That Glitters is Gold

"So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible."

- Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).  

I always put in an effort to compose a preface for the reviews published here, because I prefer a quick warm up to jumping in cold, but the problem with critiquing out-of-print and un-heard of detective stories is that, once in a while, you come across a writer whose name is completely encrusted with the stains of time – making it somewhat of a trial to find info to write a proper introduction.

Joseph Bowen is one of those unremembered names whose memory has been slowly obnubilated with grime and dust, as one decade succeeded another, and the only part of the man's legacy that is still legible is his name on the cover of The Man Without a Head (1933). Its story takes place in the sleepy village of Taos, situated in New Mexico, where a local boy, named Manuel Cortina, who holds the position of deputy sheriff, is confronted with a brutal murder by decapitation in the sealed and dilapidated home of one of the towns most eccentric citizens.

The ill-starred, but necessary, victim in this yarn is Edward Ponsonby, who, in a far and forgotten past, was one of the more important men in the region and entertained well-positioned individuals at his home, but, as the years brought the unwelcome comforts of a coffin closer, the man and his house fell into decline. Ponsonby's weakened position within the community also made way for rumors and the most persistent one is that he has a hoard of stolen gold stashed away, somewhere in his crumbled down abode, but his own behavior also fans the fires of town gossip as he's involved with two of the local women – one of them a bootlegger and the other married with a second lover on the side.

Suspects aplenty, you would say, when the deputy sheriff of Taos, who's holding the fort in absence of the sheriff, finds himself confronted with not only the decapitated and mutilated remains of Ponsonby, but also with the problem of how the murderer gained access and fled the scene of the crime with a door that was locked from the inside and windows that were covered with undisturbed cobwebs – not to mention the fact that a half-savage guard dog roams freely about the premise. Unfortunately, after this tantalizing problem is set-up, it begins to deteriorate until it resembles the crumbling, ramshackle home of the victim.

Bowen gently picks up the entire premise he had set-up over the course of fifty pages and discourteously dumps it in the trashcan, when, shortly after the reader has passed the halfway mark, Manuel Cortina receives a note from his colleagues that tied the fingerprints on the blood-spattered axe to Thomas Jenkins – one of the four miners left alive who reputedly brought their stolen gold to Ponsonby. You see, rumor has it that he betrayed them, even sullied his hands with blood, in order to keep all that gold and pitted the four men against one another and this ended with a prolonged jail sentence for Jenkins.

Of course, this clumsy attempt at hoodwinking the reader has given the entire game away and even a novice can make an educated guess at what really happened.

SPOILER (select to read): the plot of this book basically rips-off and sews together the solutions of Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890) and The Valley of Fear (1914), which Bowen, perhaps subconsciously, confirmed when he referenced Sherlock Holmes towards the end. No other fictional detective is mentioned, except for the maverick detective.

Admittedly, I was expecting a surprise like that from the outset, but the manner in which Bowen approached the plot, and bungled it, just screams sheer incompetence and this only got worst when he decided it was finally time to let the reader in on the secret of the tightly locked front door of the murder house. One of the few good parts in this book were the descriptions of the rundown house that was completely inaccessible from the outside, but this only made it more of a let down when Cortina came up with an uninspired, run-of-the-mill solution and not a very original one at that! If you're a writer and you want to insert a locked room in your mystery, but insist on explaining it away with a routine method, at least give it a novel twist (c.f. Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Solid Key, 1941).

As a reviewer who loves detective stories, I always try to accentuate one or more positive attributes of a bad or average mystery novel, be it a cast of well-drawn characters or a clever locked room trick, but I can't think of a single really good thing in this case – and this also put an emphasis on all of its short comings such as the unconvincing characters and setting (with exception of the house, but we only get a good look at it at the beginning of the story).

Well, now that I think of it, there's one positive thing I should mention and that is that Joseph Bowen, in spite of all his bungling and short comings, had his heart in the right place. I think he genuinely wanted to write a baffling detective story in which the sleuth shares all his clues with the reader, as they close-in on the truth with each passing chapter, but, in the end, his best was simply not good enough.

So no recommendations this time, I'm afraid.

From the Files of All Souls

“All Souls Law Cooperative works like a medical plan. People who can’t afford the bloated fees many of my colleagues charge buy a membership, its costs based on a scale according to their incomes. The membership gives them access to consul and legal services all the way from small claims to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

- Ted Smalley (“The Last Open File,” from The McCone Files, 1995)

They say that behind every good man stands a strong woman, in which case Bill Pronzini can rest easy knowing that "the founding 'mother' of the contemporary female hardboiled private eye" has his back. Marcia Muller has written 29 novels and published two collections of short stories featuring her female private gumshoe, Sharon McCone, who shares her universe with her husbands "Nameless Detective." I realize that mentioning the fact that Muller took home a Private Eyes Writers of America Live Achievement Award should take priority over noting the fact that they occasionally pooled their series detectives, but I really, really love crossovers. I really do.

Anyway, Marcia Muller made a previous appearance on blog when I reviewed Double (1984), in which "Nameless" bumps into Sharon McCone at a conference for private investigators. It was tremendously fun to watch two universes collide and morph into one world, but I had only explored one of them before and therefore missed that small, but essential, part that prevented me from truly appreciating the novel for what it was. I vowed that I would remedy that omission post-haste, but don't pull a third degree on me to get an answer as to why it took six months before I decided to pick up The McCone Files (1995). You should allow some thing to go unexplained.

I expected Marcia Muller to have a similar style as her husband, as both have identified their work as humanistic detective fiction, which is, of course, their main resemblance, but the McCone stories in this collection have without the presence of "Nameless' an entirely different atmosphere. I'm not sure if I can explain this feeling, but the earliest "Nameless" short stories, which, I think, stand the closest in comparison to the ones collected here, have that classical gritty feel – while these stories seem to be written in full-color. I know, it's a lousy way of explaining it, but perhaps it's the way in which Muller use words to paint an evocative landscape or urban setting. It really gives you the feeling that you're right there with Sharon McCone when she's exploring a valley on horseback, wanders through a surrealistically described building where urns are stored or walks up and down the street of a poor and crime ridden neighborhood.  

But let's take them down from the top:  

The Last Open File

This collection opens with a story of how Sharon McCone, after her previous employer kicked her to the curb, for not taking "direction well" and being "nonresponsive to authority figures," became a staff investigator for All Souls – a legal outfit designed to help the less fortunate in society rather than squeeze a few last bucks out of them. McCone's first assignment consists of tracking down a man who left a young, naïve girl with a stack of unpaid bills and a handful of bounced checks. It's an interesting, open-ended story that will find closure in the final story of this volume. 

Merrill-Go-Round

A mother asks All Souls to help her find her child, a 10-year-old girl named Merril, who went missing after a whirl on a merry-go-round, but she's very reluctant to involve the police and the matter is dropped on Sharon McCone's desk – who grapples with it until she has wrestled the truth from it and as a result may have mended a broken family.

Wild Mustard

Sharon McCone has a favorite restaurant, situated above the ruins of San Francisco's Sutro Baths, that she likes to patronize with regular visits and during each meal she observes an old Japanese woman, wearing a colored headscarf, scouring the slopes for edible herbs. But when the old woman fails to put in an appearance, McCone begins to slowly lose her appetite and starts' digging around the place – and what she uncovered is one of those unfortunate tragedies that usually merits no more than a few lines on page 3.

The Broken Men

The longest story in this collection, at forty and some pages, has Sharon McCone moonlighting as a personal bodyguard for a famous clown-duo, Fitzgerald and Tilby, during their gig at the Diablo Valley Clown Festival, but when one of them splits and leaves a body, garbed in his custom, in his wake it becomes one of those regular working days for McCone. A well-written story that is a lot closer to a traditional mystery than the ones preceding it and also has a nicely imagined, tranquil scene in which McCone explores the region on one of the gentlest (read: slowest) horses in the west. 

Ho-Ling would love and hate this story at the same time! 

Deceptions

McCone haunts the ghosts of the Golden Gate Bridge, where  "some eight hundred-odd lost souls have jumped to their deaths from its decks," hoping to find a vestige of Venessa DiCesare – a young law student who left a suicide note in her car and disappeared. I'm afraid this was, for me, a somewhat forgettable story and the evocative opening was the only thing that stuck to my long-term memory. Well, they can't all be winners.

Cache and Carry (co-written with Bill Pronzini)

It was a nice surprise when I turned over the final page of the previous story and read that this one was co-written with her husband, Bill Pronzini, co-starring his "Nameless Detective," who Sharon affectionately nicknamed Wolf, and the problem he helps her solving is of the impossible variety! The entire story consists of a telephone call between McCone and Nameless, in which she relates to him the facts in the case of a theft of two grand from a locked and secured room at a Neighborhood Check Cashing – and this suggests that the money never left the room but it was stripped-searched without results. So it’s up to "the poor man’s Sir Henry Merrivale" to locate this apparent invisible cubbyhole. Good, short and simple.

Note that McCone has no clue who H.M. is. *shakes head disappointedly*

Deadly Fantasies

Marcia Muller manifests herself in this story as a more traditional plotter and dreams up an ingenious method to administrate poison, in this case, to a young heiress who inherited her fathers multi-million dollar company and came to All Souls because she's afraid that her brother and sister, whose names were conspicuous by their absense in their fathers will, are slowly poisoning her. I, too, suspected that her siblings were feeding her something, such as unfounded suspicions to feed her paranoia and get a court to declare her mentally unsound and usurp the family fortune, but the ending turned out to be quite different – and far more tragic. 

All the Lonely People

A series of burglaries has been tied to a dating service, All the Best People, and McCone has filled out one of their application forms and braves the dating scene – looking for a man with a raccoon mask and a stuffed sack flung over his shoulders. As a crime story, it's not spectacular but a lot is made-up with McCone going on actual dates to probe for a lovelorn housebreaker.

The Place That Time Forgot

Sharon McCone is engaged to track down the estranged granddaughter of an old shopkeeper, Jody Greenglass, whose ramshackle store sneaked away from the march of progress and stands steadfastly in defiance of the rapidly changing world around it. McCone goes through the skeleton-stuffed closet of the Greenglass family and dusts off a lot of old family tragedies, but a catchy and soulful tune leads her to the end of her quarry.

Somewhere in the City

On October 17, 1989, a major earthquake that killed over seventy people and injured thousands struck the San Francisco Bay Area. This is the scene in which Sharon McCone finds herself after her last conversation with an anonymous phone caller, who has been making threatening calls to the Golden Gate Crisis Hotline, but when the city began to shake the last thing she heard, before the connection was broken, was a cry for help. Undoubtedly, the most original and fresh story in this collection.

Final Resting Place

A friend of McCone asks her help in finding out who has been leaving flowers at the San Francisco Memorial Columbarium, where the urn encapsulating her mothers ashes are interred, and what the relation of this person was to her mother – and when she begins to dust-off this problem she naturally uncovers another dreadful secret. The best part of this story was Muller's almost surreal description of the Columbarium where urns are stored under a leaky roof. 

Silent Night

This Christmas tale reminded me of Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," but instead of going on a wild goose chase for a fabulous jewel McCone spends her Christmas Eve looking for her missing nephew – and finds out how little she really knew about the boy. Along the way she also meets a few of society's misfits who spend their evening alone and makes for a nice, humanistic story.

Benny's Space

All Souls is engaged on behalf of Mrs. Angeles, a poor and hardworking mother whose social status condemned her to an even poorer neighborhood, who has been bombarded with death threats – after witnessing a local gang leader being shot. The case is referred to their staff investigator, Sharon McCone, and comes to a conclusion that puts the murder in a whole new perspective. This crime story really benefited from the poor, violent neighborhood that functioned as its backdrop. 

The Lost Coast

A local politician and his wife are under siege from a nefarious stalker, who sends dramatically worded death threats and sends floral arrangements suitable for funerals, and Sharon McCone ends up looking into the matter and stumbles over a body before she got hold of the truth – which turns out to be one of the oldest crimes in the book. I wonder if Muller found inspiration for this story in Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin because it strangely felt like one of their cases. Perhaps it was the threatening floral arrangement in combination with the murderer being trapped on an inconsistency in a statement.

File Closed

Sharon McCone's tenure at All Souls has come to an end and opened up an investigation firm of her own, but as she's cleaning out her old office she comes across her first, unclosed file – and decides to give it one last shot to tie-up all the lose ends before opening a new chapter in her life. This is perhaps the best kind of story to end a collection with.

A Knife for a Knave

“Playing detective isn’t all fun. Somebody’s going to suffer. And it’ll be a nice somebody; all our prime suspects are good people and the victim was a bastard.”

- Lolly (Murder at City Hall, 1995)

Edward I. Koch is a former attorney at law and retired politician, who exchanged the court room for a seat in the United States House of Representatives, where he served as a Congressman from 1969 to 1977, and presided over New York City as its 105th mayor from 1978 to 1989 – and this last political tenure formed the basis for a handful of detective novels "penned" in collaboration with subsequently Herbert Resnicow and Wendy Corsi Staub.

In his foreword, Koch notes that he loves to write and "decided to create a fictional Ed Koch who could be mayor of New York forever in a series of mysteries" and that he "joined forces with Herb Resnicow, whose fertile mind can conjure up the plots of the criminals as mine moves to undercover those plots and catch the crooks." I found it hard to gauge how much ink Koch himself contributed to this novel, but the construction of the plot, as he pointed out himself, definitely bore a number of the architectural features that are telling of Resnicow's style and it wouldn't surprise me if he also did most, if not all, of the writing – as a literary subcontractor, of sorts, for the ex-mayor. But more on that later.

Murder at City Hall (1995) has Ed Koch exercising one of his mayoral authorities that is rarely, if ever, wielded by a governing head of a city: the authority to perform marriages. Koch has granted a friend permission to use City Hall chapel for her daughter's wedding and even consents to perform the ceremony himself, but as he legally ties the enamored couple together someone else is cutting the lifeline of Karl Krieg short – a dishonest and despised property developer. He was found in an alcove in the chapel, after most of the attendees where heading for the gala reception at the Plaza Hotel, stabbed to death with a homemade knife wrapped in a paper napkin that functioned as a makeshift handle.

The fact that the wedding chapel has one entrance, no windows and that nearly everyone who was in attendance had to pass through a metal detector makes it somewhat of a puzzle how the knife was brought into the chapel – unless it was carried inside by someone who didn't had to pass through the metal detector at all. And guess who that person was? The mayor himself! This leaves Koch in a tight situation, one that could cost him City Hall, and decides to take it upon himself to figure out the identity of the person responsible for the murder of one of his city's most hated citizens – which he does with the ardor of an enthusiastic amateur detective and with the helping hands of his friends.

Gumshoes who operate as an equal team, like the tandem of Mayor Koch and his friend Lolly in this novel, can be seen as a staple of Resnicow's detective fiction, although, I think he glutted on this when Koch's parents flew-in to help him solve this murder and save his job. But then again, this was probably done as a request from Koch as a surprise for his folks.

Anyway, there are also other aspects of the plot that are covered with Resnicow's fingerprints, such as the personality of the victim (who are seldom possessors of a sympathetic personality in his stories), the modus operandi (stabbing is his preferred method) and the comedy, but, unfortunately, it lacked one of his clever trademark solutions that would've explained the presence of the knife by exploiting the layout and architectural features of the chapel to by pass the metal detector. The actual solution was pretty mundane and uninspired, although, there was a somewhat clever, but false, solution proposed right before the real killer was unmasked and that makes me wonder if the final explanation was dreamed up by Koch and Resnicow included his own answer to the questions proposed in this book as a false solution – which showed more foresight and ingenuity than the one they eventually went for.

Before wrapping this review up, I have to make one more observation and that is how much Koch struck me as a P-G incarnation of Sir Henry Merrivale (including an associate nicknamed Lolly!) – bouncing snappy comments off his secretary and the press hounds. I have no idea how much this fictionalized Koch resembled the real man, but I love the idea that Koch came to Resnicow with a Carter Dickson novel and asked him if he could make him a bit like H.M. Hey, it would mean that he has taste.

All in all, this was a nice, lighthearted detective story from a mystery writer who revived the classic Golden Age Detective novel during the 1980s, but was, alas, unable to do that same trick in this story – which ranks a lot closer to Murder, She Wrote than any of the past masters he paid such a beautiful tribute to in the Gold and Bear series. It's still a nice read, but I think you have to be fan of Herbert Resnicow to really enjoy it. 

By the way, does anyone want to hazard a guess how many times I wanted to type Edward D. Hoch instead of Edward I. Koch? 

Edward I. Koch

The Koch Mysteries: 

Murder at City Hall (1995; with Herbert Resnicow)
Murder on Broadway (1996; with Wendy Cori Staub)
Murder on 34th Street (1997; with Resnicow and Staub)
The Senator Must Die (1998; with Wendy Cori Staub)

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)

And I wrote a short overview of Herbert Resnicow's life and work:

Herbert Resnicow: Building a Career On Crime

Letting Sleeping Gods Lie

"It was now that the scene became suddenly of another world, a place of visions and chimeras, hideous because unexpected, terrifying because unexplained. Wide awake and in full possession of my faculties as I knew myself to be, I was at that moment the central figure of a nightmare."

- John Marriott (The Sleeping Bacchus, 1951).

Over the past few weeks, there have been brief periods of clarity in which I questioned the veracity of my hastily and overenthusiastically drawn decision that put a copy of Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991) in my covetous claws. It's tantamount to supplying an anxious pyromaniac with a box of matches, a can of lighter fluid and a derelict building to frolic around in and then act surprise when you notice the fiery tongues licking at its structure – after the first fire engines pulls up on the curb. Not to mention that this niche of the blogosphere has been doing an excellent job in itself, especially as of late, in forcing me to continuously rearrange my wish list. I mean, how can you ignore a review like this?

Hilary St. George Saunders, perhaps better known under the penname he shared with John Palmer, “Francis Beeding,” took a rather unconventional approach when he laid the groundwork for his novel The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) – which was originally a French mystery by Pierre Boileau. Saunders stumbled across a copy of Le Repos Bacchus (1938) in a Parisian bookshop and cheekily asked its author permission to emend and rewrite the book in English, which, needless to say, he got and from this arose a classic tale of a debonair gentleman thief portrayed on the canvas of a grand detective story.

The purloining of an invaluable objet d'art commonly fills the pages of a short story or relegated to the grade of a sub-plot and when such a theft takes top priority in a novel, it's usually in a caper. But this book is not an off-shoot of the Rogue School of Fiction, in which we tread on the heels of a gentleman about town as the charming fellow relieves overstuffed bankers and icy widows, dripping with diamonds, of their hoarded wealth, but one that has its roots firmly planted in the grounds of that nightmarish wonderland, "with all the mad logic of a dream," that writers like John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot used to frequent.

Ex-war veteran John Marriott receives a pressing message from his uncle Walter Thresby, a famous art collector, asking him to go on his behalf to Montreal to supervise the purchase of a painting after Thresby received a distressing message (i.e. blackmail note) from an old acquaintance – a thief nicknamed "Zed" who once before intervened in one of Thresby's attempts at obtaining a picture.

But before Marriott could lift his heels, Thresby is robbed of the showpiece of his collection, Leonardo da Vinci's "The Sleeping Bacchus," which was spirited away from his locked and secured gallery under baffling circumstances and despite catching one of the thieves they are unable to find a trace of the picture. More miracles are afoot in this story: one of the thieves returns to the estate, retrieving a cylinder from the grounds encompassing the gallery, has a run in with Marriott, who ends up tied to a fence (see the cover), and proceeds over the moors towards an "unclimbable" fence and conquers it in a matter of seconds – which could only have happened if he phased through it like a ghost. A third impossibility involves the vanishing of a Black Maria (a police van) with its occupants.

I think this story perfectly demonstrates the fallacy of Van Dine's Rulebook that states that there must be a corpse, none to be found between the covers of this book, and shows the allurement of the impossible (crime) that can turn, if properly handled, even a simple domestic problem into a genuine puzzler. But as much as I dote on these locked room mysteries, I loved the second half of the story, in which "Zed" reveals himself in a wonderful scene to John Marriott and his uncle, even more and enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game that ensued – as the former tries to relieve them of a King's Ransom in exchange for the sleeping deity while the latter attempt to retrieve the painting from its unlawful owner. Pierre and Raoul, two veteran buddies of Marriott, who eventually solve the theft and explain the string of seemingly unexplainable events that have plagued them, are assisting them in this endeavor.

The disappearance of Da Vinci's painting and the ghostly intruder, who braved an impregnable fence the way a phantom would've done, are satisfyingly explained – even though I feel a bit iffy about the fairness of them. But then again, my reading of this book has been very fragmented and perhaps missed out on one or two of the finer details that were given.

On a whole, this is an excellent, but atypical, detective story that deserves a spot in the gallery next to the masterpieces crafted by John Dickson Carr and Joseph Commings – acknowledged grandmasters of this form. But it also deserves praise for introducing a wonderful and striking villain. I know the person behind the "Zed" persona is not suppose to garner sympathy from the reader and should even be considered annoying, but I found myself unable to feel any aversion and even cheered this bandit on. It might be misplaced sympathy, but who's complaining when the fun keeps piling on? 

Recommended without hesitation! 

Just Like a Shadow

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."

- Sherlock Holmes (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902)

Glancing back at the previous reviews, penned in this series, I noticed that I prefaced each of them with a mournful remonstrance against the publishing schedule of Viz Media or lamenting the fact that older detective fans are finding it difficult to warm up to this splendid series – which is a repetitive cycle that needs to be broken. There's just one problem: the spark of inspiration was engaged elsewhere and left me here with nothing more than a vast expanse of blankness (i.e. nothing) to lead into the review.

So this left me with only one recourse: shout outs! When you have finished reading my commentary on the stories collected in the forty-first volume of Case Closed/Detective Conan you might also want to check out The Study Lamp and The Ingenious Game of Murder.

Darrel, who also takes a look at little known mystery writers who were expunged from popular view, maintains the first blog and managed to dredge up a name, from the genre's murky past, that even John Norris and Curt Evans never met before – which is no mean feat! Arun is the game master of the other blog and the mysteries that wander into his crosshairs are of the short story variety. Short stories are often overlook, but on his blog they get an opportunity to bask in the same spotlight as their novel-length companions.

And now, on to the review!

Sidelined

This brand new volume opens with a story that picks up the thread that was dropped at the end of the previous collection, in which the famous Sleeping Moore flubbed a ten-million-yen case and burned through most of the dough before he had actually earned it – leaving him and his daughter in a world of trouble. Luckily, for them, his ex-wife, ace-attorney Eva Kaden, takes it upon herself to solve this case for them, but she has to compete with an old high-school alumni, Vivian Kudo, who also happened to be Conan's mom. Unfortunately, for the reader, they come across as a bunch of Mary Sues and the only surprising aspect of this story was how uninspired and unconvincing the plot was. A poor start of an otherwise interesting volume.

"Darkness there, and nothing more"

After the mess that Richard Moore left is cleaned up, Vivian Kudo decides to treat her son and the brats from the Junior Detective League on a special pre-screening of Samurai Kid II, but, once again, murder intervenes and leaves the pint-size detective with a baffling conundrum: how could a murderer silently navigate through a darkened and cluttered room? The solution is a variation on a timeworn trick, but it perfectly fits in with the background of the story and was well clued.  

The Body in the Porsche

The police have closed off the Touto Department Store after the body of a murdered man was discovered, inside a parked Porsche, in the underground car park and Conan has to piece together this puzzle in order to lift the cordon. It's a tricky and a somewhat farfetched solution, but it shows that gimmicky tricks a la The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) work a lot better in comic format than in prose. However, the main attraction of this story is the reemergence of the Black Organization, who seem to have been on their tails like a shadow from the start of this volume, and they may have finally stumbled to their secret!

This also sets-up the next story arc, in which Conan and Anita visit her sisters old residence, serving now as an illustrators studio, in order to retrieve a message she may have hidden there, but that is something that will be revealed in the next volume. Oh, but before they can pick up the hidden message they have to solve another murder case. One of the current residents, believe it or not, was poisoned around the same time those two dropped in on them.

All in all, this was a good volume, especially for fans of the ongoing storyline, involving the Men in Black, but Aoyama seemed a bit off with most of the stories here. The motives, for example, seemed as if they were introduced as an after thought and the tricks impressed me as complex for the sake of being complex – without even as much as a touch of his usual genius (his quality/output ratio is amazing). Only the excellent second story formed an exception to this pattern. It's still a decent volume for the fans, but not one that was a good as usual, however, every once in a while you come across a volume that performs a bit below par. Oh well, the main story in the next volume promises to be a blast (murder on a ghostship during a dress party)!

FYI, it's still my one-year anniversary in the blogosphere today and the next review will, hopefully, be up within the next few days and it probably won't surprise you if I tell you I will take a look at another impossible crime novel.

Hooray for Homicide: One Year Anniversary!

Statler: "I loved it!"

Waldorf: "So what? You also loved World War II."

- The Muppet Show.

Life of the party

One year ago, today, I was launched into the blogosphere with a brief and flimsy review of Pat McGerr's Pick Your Victim (1946) and gathered momentum in the weeks and months that followed – mainly due to the people who took the time to read and comment on my vague ramblings.

It is, therefore, with a great deal of embarrassment that I have nothing to mark the occasion, like a cross-blog examination of a writer or a slew of themed reviews, which makes me feel like a clueless host who finds a throng of partygoers on his doorstep and has to inform them that there isn't a party today. I wish there was one, but time has only permitted me to post regular reviews, however, once I have unpinned myself from underneath its pointed handles I will vary my output again.

So, once again, I would like to thank everyone who has turned this blog into one of their regular haunts on the web and hopefully you will continue to patronize this blog in the future. And if you want to know how this blog came about, you should read this post.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

"In my twelve years on this spinning ball we call Earth, I've seen a lot things normal people never see. I've seen lunch boxes stripped of everything except fruit. I've seen counterfeit homework networks that operated in five counties, and I've seen truckloads of candy taken from babies."
- Fletcher Moon (Half-Moon Investigations, 2006).

When Curt Evans, under the moniker of The Passing Tramp, set off on his solitary expedition to roam the derelict legacies of the neglected mystery writer of the past one of the first dilapidated careers he wandered pass was that of J. Jefferson Farjeon – a copious writer from the Golden Era who fell by the wayside. I will refrain from summarizing his excellent introduction to Farjeon, but suffice to say, I felt compelled to check out these remnants for myself.

One title in particular caught my perusing eye, Holiday Express (1935), which Evans provided with this capsule synopsis:

“In this train mystery thriller the protagonist is a wonderfully-characterized child, an ingenuous young boy, and the book is written as if he himself had written it.”

And (later on in the comment section):

“Holiday Express is really cute, by the way. It comes complete with misspellings! Farjeon does a brilliant job of assuming the mindset of his young protagonist.”

If you've been keeping tabs on this blog, you might have bumped into the high opinion I have of Gosho Aoyama’s Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) series or picked up a few lines from my soliloquy praising Craig Rice's Home Sweet Homicide (1944) in the comment sections, which makes it, hopefully, unnecessary to explain why this book ended up with a train ticket to my bookshelves as its final destination.

The Holiday Express, whose compartments are as jam-packed with gargoyles as the famed Orient Express that stranded in the pages of one of Agatha Christie's most famous whodunits, departs for Tom, a fair-haired boy no older than twelve, as the start of an uneventful seaside holiday with his parents and sister, but the characters he meets aboard the train toppled any plans he might have had for sand castles or reading the latest Edgar Wallace thriller after swimming. First of all, there's a girl, named Joan, whom Tom refers to in his narrative as The Love Interest, who seems to have garnered the unwanted attention of her strange assortment of fellow travelers – which comprises of a fat man, a guy with a scar across his face and a chap with a monkey.

Tom and Joan's adventure begins innocently enough, as the former tramps up and down the train, slipping in and out of compartments and bumping into the key players along the way, but when he tries to return a bag that Joan dropped on the platform it gets pinched from him and its rightful owner kidnapped! So what does a boy of barely twelve do in such a situation? Tell his parents or inform the ticket collector? Nope. Tom bails from a moving train into a dark tunnel and begins chasing the kidnappers with only his D.I. (Detective Instinct) to go on.

It would be criminal to spoil his experiences and endurances, as he treks through the countryside, but it's an exciting and wonderful journey fraught with dangers and peculiar characters as he's determined to save Joan from the clutches of her captors – and this makes for a captivating read. Yeah. That was a horrible, forced and cringe-worthy pun. My well-meant apologies.

Anyway, what really makes this book a fun read is not necessarily that it's a dangerous joyride, full of thrills and action, but the narrative voice of the young protagonist – which is not only cute, as Curt Evans mentioned, but engaging as well. Tom tells more than just his story; he involves the reader by talking directly to them and explains, for example, why he withheld certain information or events in order to enhance the dramatic effect of the story. You almost feel like Bastian who reads about Atreyu's journey in The Never-Ending Story (1979), except there aren't any Luck Dragons or Rock Eaters to be found roaming around the tracks of the Holiday Express.

When I picked up this book, I expected to find a predecessor of Eoin Colfer's Half-Moon Investigations (2006), but found, instead, something that amounts to a missing link to many of the detective stories, adventure yarns and cartoons with teenage protagonists that I enjoyed – or at least it felt like that to me.

I love Aoyama's Detective Conan, Colfer's Fletcher Moon, Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), Rice's Home Sweet Homicide, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and Mitchell's The Rising of the Moon (1945) and this novel felt like the link that connected them all together. But then again, that may be a hallucinatory by effect from the nostalgia rush I had when reading this book and penning this review. Hey, I'm a suffering chronophobiac. These nostalgic mood swings can hit you like a sledgehammer!

All in all, Farjeon did an admirable job in capturing and assuming the mindset of his boy protagonist and marooning him on a world inhabited with trouble. The ensuing game of hide-and-seek between Tom and the gang will not fail to get your undivided attention from the moment the story departs until it comes to a stop at the final terminal. In short, this book is just fun.

This review and the one preceding it were rather short and compendious, but you can put that down to the whims of that tyrant on the wall known as a clock, however, I hope to babble on endlessly again in my next review. So let the reader be warned!

Now You See Him, Now You Don't

"Are you watching closely?"

- Alfred Borden (The Prestige, 2006)

Appointment With the Hangman (1935), penned by T.C.H. Jacobs, a prolific British writer of tall tales of thrills and deductions, commences with a prologue, in which Michael O'Conner is sentenced to seven years of penal servitude for his share in the heist of a parcel of the finest diamonds that were ever delved out of the African mines – and their value is estimated at eight hundred thousand pounds. He was offered a reduced sentenced in exchange for the name of his partner in crime, but O'Connor has different plans in mind for the man who betrayed him and one of the police officers reflects that if he ever saw the inside of a prison again it was to keep an appointment with the hangman.

The locality for the first chapter changes from a gloomy prison cell to a Cornish hotel, situated at the seaward end of a cove, where the owner, David Lock, is an underling of Kaspar Khron – a theurgist who can perform supernatural feats such as traveling to the fourth dimension. When this part of the story opens up for business, the hotel begins to slowly fill itself with guests who want to attend one of Khrone's séances. There's a Miss Tingle, who's as devoted to Khrone as Lock, Jimmy Buller, an undercover journalist, Sir Manfred, a retired judge and believer in the occult, Reginald Ruffles, a hare-toothed young man who doesn't seem to be too bright, and Dr. Hamilton – who's a skeptic and determined to find a rational explanation for the miracles that he's about to witness.

This part of the story, counting a hundred pages or so, has the tendency to come off confusing and slightly erratic due to the introduction of the aforementioned characters – some of who turn out to play a role in two separate storylines involving the purloined stones and those who enwreathe the miracle worker. Sorry to say, this is also turned out to be the only interesting part of the book.

Jabocs captives his readers for a short duration with a slew of apparently supernatural phenomenon: Khrone's white Chinese cat, Chan, appears, for a brief moment, to be endowed with the ability to speak with a human tongue while his master levitates in front of an awestruck audience before slowly disintegrating in front of their eyes and eventually completely dissipates from a locked room. He also walks on air and subdues a malevolent elemental spirit. Unfortunately, these are mainly unconvincing, second-rate parlor tricks that you might expect from a third-rate conjurer who tries to impress a bunch of uninterested kids at a birthday party. The only exception is how Khrone disintegrated himself. That was actually a clever and original trick, but then again, every hack magician with some loose change in his pockets can purchase a good trick and I have nothing but scorn for the manner in which he explained the levitation part.  

SPOILER (select text to reveal spoiler):  mirrors and wires were eliminated early on in the story, which left Jacobs limited imagination with only one option: Khrone actually levitated. Yup, everything else was fake except for the part he was unable to explain. Ugh. What a hack!

The Detection Club should've dispatched an envoy to his home to discuss that part of the solution with him, and with that I mean that Dorothy L. Sayers wags a disapproving finger at him while John Dickson Carr and John Rhode are smashing his typewriter to pieces.

Anyway, not much else of interest is happening at the hotel. O'Connor's storyline fizzles out after passing the halfway mark and the diamonds are relegated to the status of a McGuffin. There's also a poisoning plot hovering inconspicuously in the background, but nothing is done with that until its time to send some of the characters off to the gallows to meet their appointment with the hangman. 


I have the feeling that Jacobs attempted with this novel to play the role of Victor Frankenstein. He cut and sewn together a number of different parts of the genre, hoping to create a monster of a mystery, but ended up with a hump of in-animated, decaying meat and shame should hang like a hangman's noose on him for submitting this botched experiment to his publisher. A very early contender for worst detective story read in 2012!

If you carefully read between the lines of this review, you'll notice a lack of enthusiasm for this novel and I was seriously tempted to turn this review into a mock guest post, in which I let Jafar, from Disney's Aladdin, review this book by posting a clip of him singing You're Only Second Rate. The lyrics really fit the theme of the book and perfectly sums up my opinion of it.

And once again, a dissapointing read has translated itself in a shoddily written review. Oh well. And let me know what you think of the increased font size!

Murder in Any Language

"It's an imperfect world; always will be, as long as human beings are around. And only a fool thinks there's such a thing as a perfect crime."

- Gil Grissom (Max Allan Collin's The Killing Game, 2005)

The Boekenweek (book week), held each year in March, ever since its inception in 1932, is an annual "week" of ten days that is dedicated to Dutch literature. A well-known writer, who earned his or her place on the printed page, usually Dutch or Flemish, is asked to write a book, as a rule these are novella-length stories, that is presented as a Boekenweekgeschenk (book week gift) to everyone who purchases a book or becomes a member of a library – and in 1973 this honor was bestowed on Bertus Aafjes.

Bertus Aafjes (1914-1993) was a famed poet, novelist and world traveler, but, thanks to that peculiar sense known as hobby deformation, I always associate him with a wonderful series of historical mysteries featuring the venerable and sapient Judge Ooka – an 18th century magistrate who presided over Edo.

Before Aafjes sat down to write the book week gift, he had produced four volumes of Judge Ooka stories and was now commissioned to pen a fifth, however, there was one stipulation: it had to be adaptable for television. This left the poet of crime in somewhat of a quandary, since there were few Asian actors in the Netherlands at the time and therefore the focus of the story had to be somehow on his compatriots. Luckily, there was a stretch of time in Japanese history, known as Rangaku (Dutch learning), when the borders were as tightly closed as the door to Dr. Grimaud's study and the only Europeans who were allowed passage were Dutch traders. During those years, the Dutch enclave of Dejima was there umbilical cord to the outside world and through this contact they kept taps on the Western progress in science and technology – as well as art and literature.

Well, that takes care of one problem and resulted in Een lampion voor een blinde (A Lantern for the Blind, 1973), in which Judge Ooka is en route to Dejima to escort an envoy, De Hofstoet, from the Dutch enclave back to Edo – where they will give their homage to the Shogun. Judge Ooka is a student of Rangaku and this enabled him to communicate with the people in charge of the Dutch factory, however, his studies were not enough to fully prepare him for this meeting. Big portions of the first half of this novella concern themselves with contrasting Dutch with Japanese culture and they are engrossing if you enjoy history, but this is, after all, a detective story and soon the first problem arrives at the horizon – and it's not Commadore Perry's ship.

The last ship that arrived from Amsterdam, De Liefde, brought two heelmeesters (surgeons), the experienced Bading and the young Oranje, and one of them will be appointed as surgeon in Japan – while the other will be shipped off to a settlement in Siam. However, they both want to stay in Japan and each claimed that the other stole a letter, during their voyage, which confirmed their position as surgeon on Dejima and destroyed it. This makes it impossible to establish who's telling the truth and the decision is now up to the Opperhoofd, Captain Simon Slingeland, nicknamed The Red Oni from Holland, when they reach Edo, but the silent rivalry between the surgeons has set the tone for their journey – and during one of their first dinners Ooka makes a terrible mistake that will result in the death of one of them.

One night, Ooka tells them how he hanged two murderers on the eye-witness testimony of a blind woman and this immediately prompted an observation from the surgeons how they could've committed the perfect murder – if only they had known that the woman was blind. The judge realizes that he has made a horrible mistake, but is unable to prevent a murder. Nevertheless, when it happens even he's surprised at the devilish ingenuity on the part of the killer. It's not Oranje or Bading who was felled with a bullet, but the Opperhoofd, Slingeland, and Bading accuse Oranje of the foul deed backed up with the testimony of a blind maid. 

The girl was unable to understand what was said before the shot was fired, since they spoke Dutch, but she recognized the voice and mannerism of Oranje. You can probably guess what scheme Bading had in mind, but the best part is that nobody was really fooled and knew, or suspects, what really happened. But it's impossible to proof. The perfect crime! And the only disappointing part of the story is, perhaps, that Ooka resorted to a bluff to ensnarl the murderer instead of hatching one his Machiavellian traps, but let's not split hairs over a minor imperfection in an otherwise engrossing and charming story. 

Een lampion voor een blinde is not only one of my favorite Dutch detective stories, but also one of the best inverted mysteries, set during a very interesting period in history, I read and deserves to be translated – along side all those wonderful short stories.

This is the second book reviewed for the 2012 Vintage Mystery Challenge: Dutch Delinquencies:

My VMC2012 list: 

Een lampion voor een blinde (A Lantern for the Blind, 1973) by Bertus Aafjes

De moord op Anna Bentveld (The Murder of Anna Bentveld, 1967) by Appie Baantjer

De onbekende medespeler (The Unknown Player, 1931) by Willy Corsari
Voetstappen op de trap (Footsteps on the Stairs, 1937) by Willy Corsari

Een linkerbeen gezocht (Wanted: A Left Leg, 1935) by F.R. Eckmar

Spoken te koop (Spooks for Sale, 1936) by F.R. Eckmar
Dood in schemer (Death at Twilight, 1954) by W.H. van Eemlandt

Fantoom in Foe-lai (The Chinese Gold Murders, 1959) by Robert van Gulik

Het mysterie van St. Eustache (The Mystery of St. Eustache, 1935) by Havank

Klavertje moord (Four-Leaf Murder, 1986) by Theo Joekes

Het geheim van de tempelruïne (The Secret of the Temple Ruins, 1946) by Boekan Saja

I also reviewed one of the short story collections in this series, which you can read here.